京のキー Osaka Otters

Osaka Otters

Sea otters are so so cute, rolling over as they glide through the spacious (yet massively more confined than I'm sure they'd like) enclosure and washing their faces and upper bodies with their cute little seapaws. WANT.

Before today, I never knew how cute these otters, or those weird wall climbing crabs, were. Osaka aquarium contains the finest and most diverse group of aquatic creatures I've seen thus far, and to have dolphins, enormous manta rays, a whale shark, a horde of penguins, sea lions and otters all within the same complex made for a really great, though morally dubious, 2000yen day out.

Just avert your eyes at the end, when you go past a huge pool of multi-foot long spider crabs. Eeesh.

Sea otters are so cute, I’m almost convinced they’re not real. There are some at Vancouver Aquarium too, along with thousands of other fishy/sea mammaly (mammally?) creatures including smiley beluga whales. I love going there and it’s a great place to take visitors, but I have the same uneasiness as you regarding their confinement.

Overall, though, I think most decent aquariums do a good job of keeping their creatures as comfortable as possible and many of their research programmes do benefit the same creatures in the wild. There was a bit of an outcry here when one of the baby belugas died recently of unknown causes, many people putting it down to the stress of being in captivity, but this failed to take into account the stresses of ‘natural’ beluga life or their higher chances of death in the wild.

Sorry to rattle on; have only just discovered the blog section of your site (we’re a bit slow in Canada).Kate (URL) - 03 10 05 - 19:41